Get Gaming: Naked Scientists Christmas 2019

An institution that’s very good at minimising misery is the medical profession; and each Christmas the British Medical Journal - the BMJ - uses the festive period to publish some of the more unusual pieces of research they receive. Chris Smith hears the pick of this years crop...

Phil Sansom has been getting to the bottom of Rudolph and his famous red nose...

Householders are warned to watch out after a notorious serial burglar is supposedly active once again. This man, who can be easily identified by his bright red clothing and white beard, tends to strike around this time of year, and always leaves one or more signature calling cards in the form of objects wrapped in colourful paper. But what’s surprising is that sightings have come in from all over the world, suggesting he employs an army of decoys to get away with his crimes. Phil Sansom has been speaking to data scientist Raphael Sonabend, who, along with his fellow detective Bilal Mateen, has been trying to catch the real Father Christmas using statistics…

Leigh Milner has the latest gaming news...

Leigh - Playstation has just announced it’s Dualshock 4 “Back Button” attachment!

Yes really, the accessory you didn’t know you needed.

According to the company “this new attachment elevates your gameplay by delivering more versatility and performance, while maintaining the comfort and feel of the wireless controller you’ve come to love.”

It’s coming out in a few weeks but how much does it cost? £30. So £15 a button.

PS4 TROPHY SFX

In other Playstation News… the original Playstation One turned 25 years old recently… In a blog post, Jim Ryan, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said "It's truly humbling to see fans who grew up on PlayStation... passing down their love of gaming to their children, who are now playing on PS4. On behalf of all of us at PlayStation – thank you for taking this journey with us. We can't wait to celebrate what comes next with you!"

Incidentally the PS5 is slated for a Christmas 2020 release.

PS1 SFX

And finally…

Fortnite has crossed over to the Dark Side… by collaborating with the Star Wars Universe.

Disney has teamed up with Epic Games to bring all kinds of exclusive content to the popular battle royale shooter, including an in-game screening of a scene from the latest film,The Rise of Skywalker.

It’s not clear at this stage... if the screaming children who watched the screening will be banned from the game or not. But they should be.

You might have heard this story recently: The world’s rarest Pokémon card sold at an auction in New York for around £150,000. Only 39 copies of the ultra- rare Pikachu card were ever released - as a prize in a drawing competition in Japan... and only 10 of them are known to be in circulation. This particular card is drawn by the original Pikachu artist Atsuko Nishida, and it sold for more than three times the previous record for this exact card. So why are trading cards worth so much money? Chris Berrow found out from “professional sports authenticator” Terry Melia, who decides how much collectible cards are worth and they valued this specific card...

Terry - Astute collectors nowadays understand the importance of getting their memorabilia and or cards graded. So they submit sometimes in bulk, sometimes in single cards, their items to PSA for grading. And there are different levels to that grading. The turnaround times, all of that sort of impacts the fee. But, for instance, they could turn in a card to get both, uh, a grade as well as authentication and that would be about a $20 turnaround. And what they do is, when the cards are submitted to us, obviously they go through a big screening process and we have professional graders - people that have been in this business for years that know what to look for when they're trying to identify a specific identifiers on the card. For instance, measurement's important: trading cards are generally two and a half inches wide by three and a half inches tall. The card stock that is used is also something we analyze - the thickness of the paper stock. In the case of upper deck trading cards, for instance, they have a hologram that's situated on the back of all of their cards. These are all things they need to look for. And then, of course, they start looking at the card for condition. You know, is it something that has dinged quarters, uh, corners? Is there discoloration because the card was left out in sunlight for too long? All of those things impact the final grade that's awarded to the card.

Chris - What's the top grade? Is it A1 or something like that?

Terry - Yeah, we actually use numbers. It's a one through 10 grading system. A one would be poor, and that obviously is your least desirable card in its condition. And then gem mint 10 is the top - a great card. Anything from mint nine to gem mint 10 commands pretty good bucks on the secondary market. And that's, again, if somebody wants to take the time to sell those cards, uh, whether it's through an auction house or whether it's online through eBay or even if it's just going down to the local hobby shops and seeing if they can make a deal with the dealer behind the counter.

Chris - And we heard about this Pikachu card that sold at auction for £150,000 pounds very recently. Is that one of the most valuable cards of recent times cause it seems like it be all estimates for similar cards that had previously been sold or is that kind of small fry compared to some of the others?

Terry - No, it's certainly not small fry. In fact, the highest price that was ever paid for a Pokemon card at auction all by itself. So that's an exception, but at the same time it shows that the industry itself is really picking up. But one of the things that impacts the, um, the value of that card on the secondary market value is its scarcity, and that particular pikachu illustrator card, that was a promo card that was given out to winners of a comic contest that was held in Japan back in 1997 or 98, and, I believe, there were 39 of those cards awarded. And today they're guesstimating that there's only about 10 of those that have surfaced and are still around. So that obviously makes it, you know, valuable in itself, but also just a collectible that people want. And in this industry, scarcity does impact price.

Time now to look at new releases… and there’s a couple for you… let’s start with Frozen Free Fall, released in conjunction with the film Frozen 2. So is the latest free to play mobile release any good? You get a grid, match the gems and they pop with you getting points! Let’s hand it over to a man who’s as cold as ice, our resident snow man enthusiast and Olaff-ing stock: Alex Rhodes...

Hello there, Chris. Alex here. Now, when you told me that I can be playing a game that ties in with a beloved movie franchise that's very current right now and the all the rage and everyone's talking about it and actually thought, oh, I'm going to be playing with the Star Wars game. I'm not... I'm playing Frozen Free Fall. Uh, I think it came out recently with Frozen 2. It's a mobile game as well. So let's just give it a whirl. Shall we? I've got it installed on my phone here. I'm actually coming to you not from my normal... usually, you know, I'm in my bedroom... this time.... I'm actually at my girlfriend's parents' house for the sort of Christmas period. They're all downstairs. I just sort of snuck upstairs to play computer games by myself. So let's give it a go boot up. Here we are, from what I can tell you, Disney logo is loading up. It looks a bit like a kind of Bejeweled knockoff.

Ooh, here we go. Enter your age, it's embarrassing. 27. I feel like it should close itself down and be like, this isn't for you mate. Okay. I'm looking at a big sort of map. This is me. Loads of levels. Each sort of little nodule on the map represents a level. I think you can't miss this in the top left. Uh, in big letters is "sale"... like many a mobile game... I imagine this will makes all its money... It was free to install... so I imagine it makes all its money from micro transactions. So our target is 7,500 points. I've got 20 moves.

There we go. That was a pretty good one. If you like Bejewelled, you're probably going to like this cause it hits that kind of, you know, scratches that itch of lots of bright colors and sort of sparkly things. And uh, one of the characters I think from Frozen 2 is kind of staring at me with a dead eyed expression at the moment. At the top of my screen we've got free four. What's happening? Magical. I seem to have done it. It's, I've not pressed anything. It's just the target was 7,500. I got 40,000. Oh there's Olaf the little snowman guy again, popping in with a sort of dead expression. From what I can tell, nobody talks in this game. You think the whole advantage of being in the officially licensed game is that you have voice actors. This doesn't even sound like the Frozen music. It just like kind of knock off muzak. Okay. What's this? All right. Okay. This is all like a special gem. You combine it with any ice crystals to break all that. Okay. So yeah, this is something from Bejewelled that's time one of the special tiles. It's just doing it again. It's just like playing the game. I'm not impressed at anything and I'm getting thousands of points here. Target was 10,000 for this level. I've got 41,000 and I barely did anything...

Board games are always popular at family get-togethers. But why? And how do you come up with something new to rival the classics. Caezar Al-Jassar is from Alleycat Games based in Cambridge. They design unusual board games including Dice Hospital… Chris Berrow asked him when did it all begin?

Caezar - I was a postdoc at the laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge. And in the last six months of that postdoc, I started developing a science-themed game with my wife. It was called Lab Wars. So we started working on it, and we play-tested it. We did all the art and stuff; we put it on Kickstarter. And that did really, really well, because it got featured on a whole plethora of science-based news channels. And the biggest one was Nature News. Since then we've made about, I don't know, 10, 11 Kickstarters.

Chris - So how do you try and make a popular game that people will enjoy?

Caezar——我们的哲学是我们试图让主题games. They're not just abstract things where you're moving pieces around: you actually feel engrossed in the theme. So, for instance, with Dice Hospital it's actually our most popular title. You literally feel like you're managing a hospital by manipulating the dice because the dice are the patient's health levels. So, so you're literally moving pieces, uh, which is like a doctor. You move them into a room and that manipulates the dice. There's also Dice Hospital Community Care. So it's the expansion that did really, really well. I think that had like almost 3,000 backers or something. Um, and right now we have another Kickstarter which is like a polynesian seafaring game, designed by some famous German designers and that's on Kickstarter right now. So yeah, we're always busy doing things.